Why We Love This Crazy Game Called Baseball

By: C.G. Morelli

It occurred to me a while back while watching an inter-league game between the Mets and Mariners (of all teams) that I really love this game. No, I mean I REALLY love this game. To those of you who are forced to listen to the incessant ravings of my maniacal, baseball-saturated brain matter wax poetic about the savage ballet that is the suicide squeeze (sorry, honey), this is no real surprise. In fact, I was quite aware of my addiction long before this random yet unforgettable game, when a chubby but loveable youngster named Felix Hernandez pitched his way to…wait a minute…this box score can’t be correct. Did Felix freakin’ Hernandez really hit a grand slam?

And that, my friends, is exactly how I realized why I love this game so much. It’s for the simple fact that on any night, in any ball park, whether there’s a match up between division rivals or division doormats, you could see something you’d never dreamed would have happened.

Of course, King Felix’s little dinger was not the most classic example of one of these amazing instances. It served as little more than a reminder. But perhaps if I set the stage I can help you relish in a few of baseball’s more magical moments.

Yes, then you’ll see where I’m coming from.

“The Catch”

The time:  September 24, 1954

The place:  Polo Grounds (Brooklyn, NY)

The situation:  Game One of the World Series between the Giants and Indians

With the score tied 2-2 in the top of the eighth inning, Vic Wertz of the Indians sent a drive to the deepest part of center field.  Giants centerfielder, Willie Mays, turned and sprinted all the way back to the fence to make an amazing over-the-shoulder catch.  Some say the ball traveled almost 450 feet before landing in his glove, but Mays wasn’t finished.  He whirled around in mid-stride and fired a bullet to second base to prevent a run from scoring.  Mays had single-handedly stopped the Indians from taking the lead.  The Giants went on to win the game in extra innings and they eventually swept the Indians to win the series.

“The Shot Heard ‘Round the World”

The time:  October 3, 1951

The place:  Polo Grounds (Brooklyn, NY)

The situation:  Playoff series to determine the pennant between the Giants and Dodgers

In just over a month, the Giants caught the Dodgers in the standings despite once trailing by 13 ½ games.  The Giants’ late push caused the two teams to finish in a tie.  To decide which team would move on to face the Yankees in the World Series, the league held a three-game playoff series. 

With the series tied a game a piece, the Dodgers built a 4-1 lead in game three that they carried into the bottom of the ninth.  It looked like the series was over.  But the Giants fought back, scoring a run and putting two more runners on base.  Then, Bobby Thomson stepped to the plate and smashed a dramatic three-run homer over the left field fence to win the game and the series.  He would forever be known for firing “the shot heard ‘round the world.”

“The Called Shot”

The time:  October 1, 1932

The place:  Wrigley Field (Chicago, IL)

The situation:  Game Three of the World Series between the Yankees and Cubs

After winning the first two games of the series in New York, Babe Ruth led his Yankees into Chicago.  He angered Chicago fans by promising that his team would sweep the series from the Cubs.  When Ruth took the field in game three, he was greeted by flying vegetables tossed at him from the stands.  Ruth responded by clobbering two homeruns in the game, one of which goes down in baseball legend.

It is said that Ruth stepped to the plate and pointed to a spot beyond the right field fence.  Then he took a mighty swing and hammered the next pitch out of the park to the exact spot where he had pointed.  The Yankees would go on to sweep the Cubs in the series, but it was Ruth’s famous “called shot” that would become one of the most storied events in baseball history.

“True Grit”

The time:  October 15, 1988

The place:  Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles, CA)

The situation:  Game One of the World Series between the Dodgers and the A’s

Kirk Gibson only had one at-bat in the 1988 World Series, but he made it count.  He was nursing multiple leg injuries and many of his teammates told reporters that the slugger could barely walk.  Dodger fans were sad to hear that he would probably not play at all in the series. 

But, in the very first game, with his team down 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth and with Hall of Fame closer Dennis Eckersley on the mound, Gibson limped out of the dugout to the surprise of everyone.  He told Dodgers manager, Tommy Lasorda, that there was one more swing left in him. 

Barely able to hold himself upright at the plate, Gibson drilled a game-winning two-run homer into the right field bleachers.  He limped around the bases amid the wild celebration of nearly 56,000 fans.  Inspired by the slugger’s incredible feat, the Dodgers went on to win the World Series over the A’s in just five games.

Every time I think of baseball, it is with the images of these crucial moments swirling through my mind. They are what define the game for me and allow me to appreciate baseball’s past, present, and future. They are what help me to never forget why I love the game so much.

So, now it’s your turn. What moments help you remember why you love baseball?

The Most Miserable Fans on Earth

By: C.G. Morelli

Being a fan of any professional sports team is hard work.  You take the ups and downs of a grueling season just like the players, only without any of the control.  You obsess over waiver moves, trade deadlines, and salary caps.  Your eyes are trained to periodically glance from game to sports ticker and back to game without missing a second of the action.  But, I assure you, being a sports fan in any of the following cities is a whole different animal.  There’s no doubt that these are the homes of some of today’s most miserable fans.  

Seattle, Washington

From the days of Steve Largent to the current Hasselbeck-led version, the Seahawks have always been a tough out.  But they’ve always been out of the winner’s circle.  Seattle fans have seen their football team make it to the Super Bowl only once since the franchise was founded in 1976, and they lost in tear-your-heart-from-your-chest fashion to Tom Brady and the Patriots.

The M’s have also had their moments.  They won the AL Wildcard in 2000 and advanced to the ALCS where they lost to the Yankees.  Then, they put together a record 116-win season en route to another ALCS against the Yankees.  It was a punch to the gut for all Seattle residents when the Bombers trounced their Mariners in five games.  I’m sure the original departure of Ken Griffey, Jr. and the loss of A-Rod didn’t feel so great either. 

Oh, and the Sonics? I don't have the heart to go there.

Kansas City, Missouri

Marty Schottenheimer basically built his legacy as the biggest playoff loser during his tenure as head coach of the Chiefs.  He’s long since left the post, but the team has continued to disappoint under the last two coaching regimes despite having one of the most dominating rushing attacks the NFL has seen in the past decade. 

In a city that loves its football, the Chiefs’ plummet into NFL mediocrity is intolerable.  But at least the Kansas City faithful get some relief once summer rolls around, right?  Wrong.  Two words: Royals suck.  Five more words for the road: Not much relief in sight.

Buffalo, New York

If it’s not bad enough digging yourself from beneath three feet of snow every other day, imagine losing the Super Bowl every year…for four straight years.  It’s no secret that the Bills accomplished this feat from 1990 through 1993.  Things have only gotten worse since then.  Buffalo fans paint their chests and endure arctic temperatures every Sunday as they continue to wait for their first playoff berth since 1999.

But don’t despair Buffalonians, you still have the Sabres…although they’ve never won the Stanley Cup and seem to be doing their best impression of the city’s football team.  How many times is this team going to come up just short?  Even the Dominek the Dominator couldn’t get the Sabres over the hump.  Antacid shortages have been reported in upstate New York.

Cleveland, Ohio

Sweet misery has a penthouse apartment in downtown Cleveland.  Ladies and gentleman, we can ignore it no longer.  The fans in this city have had it rough.  Just think about it.

The Indians haven’t won the series since 1948.  And let’s just highlight a few of the more recent collapses this team has suffered during that span.  In Game 7 of the 1997 World Series, Jose Mesa blew a 2-1 Indian lead in the bottom of the ninth, which allowed the Marlins to win the series two innings later on a clutch hit by Edgar Renteria.   This past season, the Tribe held a 3-1 ALCS lead, only to watch it slip away to the Red Sox.  Let’s face it, the best thing to happen to this franchise in the past 50 years was the movie Major League.

What’s worse is that there’s not a Clevelander around who can remember the last time the Cavaliers won an NBA title.  That’s because it never happened.  Since the team’s founding in 1970, the Cavs have only made a single appearance in the Finals.  It came in 2007 and ended in a four game drubbing at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs…and that was with Lebron.

Let's not
 forget the Browns of the late 80’s.  Bernie Kosar led the team to three AFC Championships between 1986 and 1989.  Unfortunately, on all three occasions, a man named John Elway was there to greet the Browns at the door and send them all home crying to their mommies.

A final slap-shot to the face of all Cleveland fans, is the simple fact that a town like Columbus was found more attractive to hold an NHL franchise.  Columbus??  Really?? Wow. I guess you could always replace the hockey games with some Drew Carey re-runs.

When Was The Best At His Best?

When a pitcher piles up 511 wins, 749 complete games, 76 shutouts, 2,803 strike outs, and a 2.63 ERA in a 22 year career, it’s mighty hard to determine which season was his best. This is an especially daunting task when that pitcher is none other than the crown jewel of hurlers, the namesake of possibly the most prestigious award in all of baseball, the indomitable Cy Young.

You can take his 1892 performance with Cleveland, where he won 36 games and pitched a mind-boggling 453 innings. His ERA was a microscopic 1.93 and he fanned 168 batters. But he was a fiery and muscular 25-year-old with scarcely an idea of what he had just accomplished. Therefore, how can I bow to mere statistics? It’s simply too easy to shield myself with the numbers alone.

The same can be said of Cy’s output in 1895, also with Cleveland. Young, now 28, notched 35 wins against only 10 losses. But he wasn’t the utterly dominant pitcher he was just three years prior. In fact, he allowed his ERA to balloon (well, for Cy) to 3.26 by the end of that season…and he had a good squad to back him up.

Let’s fast forward a few years to 1901, Cy’s debut season with the Boston Americans of the AL. Now, 34 years of age, the crafty Young threw 371 innings, won 33 games and shrunk his ERA back down to a nearly invisible 1.62. OK, so now we’re getting somewhere. We’re starting to see what this man was truly made of.
Although Cy was very good in 1901, in my eyes this season wasn’t good enough to be considered his “best.” There was just something missing.
 
Let’s jump ahead again to the season…the year of 1908. It was a very forgettable one for Boston (now the Red Sox), who finished four games under .500 and in 5^th place. But Cy Young logged a performance which rivals that of any pitcher in baseball history. 

Of Boston’s 75 wins, 21 of them were owned by Young despite the shaky team he had behind him that year. He only lost 11 games while pitching 299 innings. He struck out 150 batters against only 37 walks, and he allowed (get this!) only a single home run the entire season. Young reduced his ERA to a career low of 1.26 and even tossed his third career no-hitter in a game against New York on June 30.

But none of these statistics are what really move me to decree 1908 as Cy Young’s landmark season on the mound. The most impressive statistic was not one bred by baseball at all. It was one bred by nature. Everything he accomplished in ’08 took place inside the pudgy body of a 41-year-old man. And yes, I think it’s pretty safe to say performance enhancers weren’t at work here, people. I gotta be honest, I’m not 100 percent sure they even had ice back then.

What this man was able to accomplish at such a ripe age simply defies nature. It puts things in perspective by reminding us, as we begin to formulate some early preferences for this year’s award winners, why Mr. Young’s name adorns such a valuable piece of hardware over a hundred years later. And it’ll still be the same a hundred years after that.

Now that you’ve had a chance to crunch some of the numbers, which of Cy Young’s illustrious seasons do you love most?

A Mighty Good Feller

By: C.G. Morelli

It’s mighty hard to set major league records when you’re crouched down in a U-boat with bombs bursting around it. But somehow, inexplicably, Mr. Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians managed to do pretty well in that department even though he spent the prime of his career some 3,000 miles from the nearest American League ball park.

Feller was a 16-year-old farm boy from Van Meter, Iowa when he signed with the Indians in 1935. He may have been a little wet behind the ears, but his fastball was that of a hardened veteran.

In a 1936 exhibition game against St. Louis, a then 17-year-old Feller struck out eight batters in just three innings of work. Performances like these became more and more common for the young phenom, netting him the goofy (and somewhat pornographic) nickname “Rapid Robert.” It also earned him comparisons to some of the premiere strikeout pitchers in baseball history, such as one known to most as Big Train.

“He (Feller) was the fastest pitcher I’d ever seen,” former AL umpire Bill Ormsby once said, “Walter Johnson included.”

In 1938, Feller notched a lasting statistic into the record books when he struck out 18 hitters in a season finale at Detroit. The total tied the original record set by Henry Porter back in 1884.

A quick side note, and one of the only knocks on the nearly invincible Feller, was that the Tigers actually beat him in the game in which he fanned 18, mostly because of erratic control. Feller set the dubious record for walks in a season with 208 that same year.

And then he promptly went out the following season and became the first pitcher ever to win 20 games before the age of 21.

In 1940, Feller registered another first. This time spinning the American League’s first ever Opening Day no-hitter.

And then he went off to war for four consecutive seasons of baseball.

He was 22 years old, in the prime of his career, and he already had 107 wins and 1,233 Ks under his belt. But he decided to enlist in the Navy out of principle, and before it became fashionable for ball players to do so. In fact, he was the very first big leaguer to enlist for active duty after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He served as a gunner aboard the USS Alabama and picked up eight battle stars along the way.

His triumphant return to the diamond in 1946 yielded 26 wins and 348 strikeouts.  It was the “Van Meter Heater’s” greatest campaign on the books. Feller’s status in the league from then until his retirement in 1956 was consistently among the elite pitchers in baseball.

He threw two more no-hitters to go along with 12 one-hitters, and he added another 133 wins to bring his career total to 266. He fanned 1,000 more batters to finish with 2,581.

These were all numbers quite worthy of induction into the Hall. And without too much suspense, Feller made it on the first try in 1962.

But still, there are questions that will always linger above Feller’s plaque in Cooperstown:

What could Rapid Robert have accomplished in the four seasons he spent defending his country? Could he have left the 300 wins plateau in the dust? Could he have eclipsed 3,500 strikeouts? Would he now be considered the greatest pitcher in major league history?

We’ll never know. What we do know is that Bob Feller was one of the best damn pitchers to ever toe the rubber.

And he was a hero to boot.

'Lord, Baseball is a Worryin' Thing'

By: C.G. Morelli

As a 14 year old boy breaking his back in the Pennsylvania coal mines for just 60 cents a day, Stan Coveleski sure came a long way. The Polish Prince was such a hard worker and worked such long hours that he once said, “I got to thinking the sun only came out on Sundays.”

But the eventual Hall of Famer wouldn’t be spending much more of his life in the dark. By the time he was 17, Stan had taken a page out of the scripts of his five brothers, four of whom were involved in professional baseball at some level.

Coveleski started playing for a local team in Shamokin, PA and he quickly found his calling as a pitcher with pin point control. That the fresh faced kid they called “Covey” was so accurate on the mound was a surprise to no one. After all, he’d spent every morning of his childhood setting up tin cans on a fence post and systematically knocking them down with the fluid toss of a few stray stones.

“The plate’s a lot bigger than a tin can to throw at,” he said, “When it came to throwing a baseball, why, it was easy to pitch.”

The Polish Prince pitched only five games for the little team from Shamokin. That’s all it took for minor league scouts from the Lancaster club of the Tri State League to notice the kid’s talent. And without so much as a moment’s hesitation, Covey signed a contract that would save him from the inside of a pitch black coal mine forever.

After just two and half seasons with the club from Lancaster, Coveleski was scooped up by Connie Mack, who watched the young rookie make his first major league start in a Philadelphia Athletics uniform in 1912. The result? A three-hit shutout and the youngster’s first-ever victory. But success wouldn’t last long for young Stan.

He endured a few up and down seasons in Philadelphia and became more well known as the brother of “Giant Killer” Harry Coveleski (who had beaten the NY Giants three times in one week during the 1908 season to stifle their attempt at a pennant) than for his own performance on the mound. Stanley found himself bouncing from club to club, even back down to the minors in the Pacific Coast League. But he eventually found a home in Cleveland in 1915, and his time in the PCL would prove to be his greatest asset.

It was during his time in the PCL that Covey first witnessed a pitch that would change his career. It was the spit ball. He began developing his ability to control the pitch, and once he had it mastered, there wasn’t a thing he couldn’t make a baseball do once it left his famous right hand.

From 1915-1928, Coveleski and his devastating spitter were utterly dominant on the mound. He won 216 games, struck out 972 batters, and recorded a lifetime 2.89 ERA.

In 1920, Covey registered one of the greatest World Series performances of all time. He led the Indians to a World Championship by pitching in and winning three games. He allowed the Brooklyn Dodgers only two runs in 27 innings of work and posted a 0.67 World Series ERA, a record that still stands today.

Coveleski endured even after Major League Baseball banned the use of the spitball after the 1920 season. He and 16 other established spitball pitchers were grandfathered in as having permission to continue throwing the pitch. This designation was pivotal in Covey’s career, allowing him to continue his dominance for another eight seasons, five of which he recorded 20 wins or more.

Stan Coveleski was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969 by the veteran’s committee. Even after an illustrious career, he never lost sight of the dark mornings he spent tossing stones at tin cans and enjoying the relative simplicity of a coal miner’s life that contrasted starkly with the every day pressures of playing professional baseball.

“It’s tomorrow that counts (in baseball),” he said after retirement, “So you worry all the time. It never ends. Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.”